- Title: Fat Ham
- Written by: James Ijames
- Director: Philip Akin
- Actors: David Alan Anderson, Raven Dauda, Nehassaiu deGannes, Peter Fernandes, Virgilia Griffith, Tawiah M’Carthy, Tony Ofori
- Company: Canadian Stage
- Venue: Berkeley Street Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Until March 9, 2025
Ever wonder why a bad actor is sometimes called a ham?
Like plenty of North American slang – the “peanut gallery” to mock back seat critics, the “cakewalk” to describe an easy victory – the term has dubious roots. In the late 19th century, minstrel performers used a mixture of burnt cork and ham fat to concoct black face paint, ultimately resulting in the blackface that damned minstrelsy to one of the most shameful corners of American history. The ash-and-lard recipe was popular enough that it even had its own song.
A century and a half after The New York Times printed the lyrics (and unsavoury context) of The Ham-Fat Man, James Ijames’s Pulitzer-winning play about a young man named Juicy has landed at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre. Fat Ham isn’t about blackface, nor is it an adaptation of Hamlet (though the ghost of that play certainly haunts this one).
No, Fat Ham is a beast all its own, lobbed across the Canadian border in a cloud of barbecue smoke and treated with care by director Philip Akin, whose cast offers outstanding performances of a script spring-loaded with dramaturgical traps.
Juicy (Peter Fernandes) is depressed. His father has just died, murdered in prison by a sharpened toothbrush, and his mother Tedra (Raven Dauda) has married his uncle (David Alan Anderson, who also plays Juicy’s father). When a cypher shows up at the wedding barbecue, cloaked in a white sheet, Juicy is forced to choose between his dreams of a career in HR and his destiny, which may or may not include killing his uncle.
Sound familiar?
Ijames’s heavy-handed allusions to the Bard prop up a play whose primary interest isn’t Juicy’s indecisiveness, but his empathy, and his ability to hold space for the simultaneous pain and levity of a family clouded by grief. Juicy’s clan is one of extremes: Laughing one minute, dead the next, with the omnipresent smell of smoked meat always in the air, a warning of what’s to come. (Cherry Street Bar-B-Que has sponsored the grub that gets cooked onstage each night.)
Indeed, Juicy’s inner circle drips with idiosyncratic sauce. When confidant (Hora-)Tio shows up to the barbecue stoned, ready to crush a plate of brisket and sides, he’s derailed by the memory of a recent dream, in which he was sexually pleasured by a gingerbread man. That’s quite the aside for a play ostensibly about murder, but Tony Ofori makes it work, blitzed and giggly as Tio waxes nostalgic about frosting.
Tio’s not the only familiar presence. Opal, clad in a mermaid-cut prom dress and battered Doc Martens, likes girls, as much an ally to queer Juicy as she is a member of her own violent dream world. (Virgilia Griffith is astonishing in the role.) Larry, a Marine, arrives at the barbecue in his uniform, his deepest secrets tucked into the starched corners of his coat and kept shrouded from his mother (Nehassaiu deGannes). Like Griffith, Tawiah M’Carthy is at the top of his game here, a locked vault with tantalizing wisps of softness leaking from the seams.
Unsurprisingly, Fernandes is gripping as Juicy, with moments of soliloquizing that might make you wonder how Fernandes wasn’t tapped to play Hamlet, or some version of him, sooner. Fernandes brandishes Juicy’s mood swings like a magic trick, cannily hopping between the seven stages of grief. His karaoke rendition of Radiohead’s Creep suggests a Juicy who’s not great at making friends, and who wants more than anything just to be loved – by his mother, by Larry, by anyone. A Juicy whose only hope at authentic connection is the HR cubicle at some imaginary office.
Ultimately Fat Ham is less about Hamlet and more about Ijames’s perception of Black America, in which “queer” and “soft” are insults with as much wallop as “woke” and “diverse” in conservative white circles – a seemingly throwaway line about generations of incarcerated Black men carries as much contextual heft as the foul history of blackface embedded into Ijames’s title. Despite Akin’s nimble, open-hearted production, I found myself wishing for a little less Prince of Denmark and whole a lot more Juicy, particularly in the final stretch of the play.
Akin’s Fat Ham supposes a backyard so artificial it’s almost make-believe, with pristine cut grass and butter-yellow siding free of dirt and debris (Brandon Kleiman’s set evokes the manicured garden in the third act of Parasite – from the first beat of the play you know someone’s not making it out of here alive).
“It’s Shakespeare. Kind of,” summarizes Juicy, his “Momma’s Boy” jersey drooping clumsily off his shoulders, the aroma of charred flesh hanging in the air, red solo cups rolling in the breeze. “Kind of,” indeed.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
